An increasing amount of mobile traffic is moving to vendor-specific proprietary protocols. Examples include Google's traffic over TCP port 5228, WhatsApp, Urban Airship push notifications used by various application vendors, Skype, Yahoo Mail 2.0 etc. This means that more and more of the application traffic that causes signaling now includes significant contribution from proprietary protocols on top of traffic utilizing standardized protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS. Conventional optimization of signaling relies upon some understanding of the protocol being used. Thus, there is a clear need for the ability to optimize signaling even for arbitrary, proprietary, and/or non-standard protocols, e.g., where the underlying protocol definition may be unknown.